Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,31

up on the gaze. Sometimes Moll talked and sometimes she showed Nyssa the bones she found in the woods. Sometimes she played her pot and sometimes she threw stones. Sometimes she stared silently from the naked orb of her head, eyes blank, a source of little visible delight. Nyssa could not say why she went to the bony woman, only that she was drawn to her, as if Moll were some part of herself. Moll belonged not to the island but to its caves and holes, to a place that is dead to the world above. Hers were raw and devouring passions, and loveless. And yet, when Nyssa lay on the ground beside Moll and put her ear against the pine needles and listened to the thick echoes from the rocks beneath, she sensed with the uncanny instinct of a daughter of Dagmar that birth and death are of a single essence and that she knew little of either. These were things she did not have the words to say. In the low moaning of Moll’s pot she heard music beyond what she could play on her fiddle. Most people are, once or twice in a life, drawn to things that may harm them and that they cannot understand. Things that are necessary.

She came home from her visits to Moll and stared without seeing, listening to all the sounds of the island until Dagmar chided her. But Nyssa was absent in the way that silence is absence from sound. She played drones in her fiddle tunes until the people complained that she ruined the danciness of the music. They said that no one had ever played in this way before and that it didn’t sound right.

Nyssa said, It’s what I hear.

She was not afraid and she played what she wanted. Fierce and dancing, she followed what she was drawn to. Her ear was open.

One night, after they’d finished their snaking, Donal played an old tune while the birdwatcher laid out the bones of a bird, trying to figure out how the skeleton went together. What’s it called? he said.

Donal thought a moment and thought again. I can’t remember.

The other man shrugged, turned the little bones of the ribs around and said, It doesn’t really matter. They all sound alike.

But they didn’t and Donal couldn’t remember. He leaned his bass against the wall and seeing the pattern of the bird’s ribs quickly rearranged them in order, only the second one missing. Something in his ear was dying and he with it.

Why do you stay so long out here? Donal asked.

To see the end of the world. The birdwatcher admired Donal’s quick eye. He could catch a snake, drop it into a bag and tie it shut with his teeth before the snake flung itself up and attacked. He could look at scattered bones and see the living creature’s shape.

Is this place the end?

Could be here. Could be anywhere.

Is that the only reason you stay?

There was a woman but she left. She said she couldn’t breathe when I was there.

Donal worked on the fine bones of a foot and shifted the small skull out of the way. He said, We say that we stay for love, run away for love, but a woman just goes firmly on in the same place being herself.

You?

I did not tell her that I loved her. She went with my friend. I didn’t try to change her course. This is the truest love.

Where will you go next?

Donal hesitated. Don’t know, he said.

What was to follow? Donal’s hands were scarred with snakebite. He fished and climbed coconut trees for milk, wove fronds to replace worn thatch. But the hot winds never felt right against his skin. The sea is subtle—dread creatures glide under it, treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. An island, Melville said, is like a place in the soul, full of peace and joy, encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. Donal stared at the bones of the birds devoured by snakes and said, There’s an island up north where an old woman used to bury all the birds that broke their necks on her windows. That’s where I’m going next.

He wanted to hear the old men at night. It was time to go back. Before everything disappeared. Colin would know the name of that tune.

Nyssa put on Norea’s old honeymoon negligee and danced a one, two, three around the old woman.

I’ve got on your lacy nightdress, Nana, she said. I like